


BFF

by ask_the_birds



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/F, M/M, Post-Season Three, Telephone, idk friendship, internalized homophobia for mike (as per usual)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:08:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28586235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ask_the_birds/pseuds/ask_the_birds
Summary: He caught her eye at the Snow Ball, over Mike’s shoulder. There was this vivid jolt of fear that went through him when their eyes met, like he’d been caught (but it wasn’t that weird to look at his friend- his eyes just went that direction).She held his gaze. He sought out the girl that Mike had described, the one who supposedly could see through people, who had limitless knowledge of the hidden universe. But he couldn’t find it. She just looked like a girl dancing with his best friend.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper/Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Will Byers/Mike Wheeler
Comments: 7
Kudos: 51





	BFF

Eleven had this box of things that she brought from Hawkins. Will didn’t know where most of it came from, but he saw it all the time, this mid-sized cardboard box full of books and papers and a tiny little radio. Every day, ritualistic, she slid it out from the bottom shelf of a cabinet they kept in the living room and brought it to the kitchen table. And every day, she took everything out and placed the debris in front of her like she was going to play solitaire with a paperback with the cover ripped off and a pink spiral notebook with the letter L on it. 

Will didn’t get it. Why did she take the time to lay it all out if she wasn’t intending to use everything? On occasion he’d seen her reading, or writing in the notebook, but definitely not every day. 

He wanted to ask her but there was absolutely no way he was doing that. He stayed in his unfamiliar room, with his paper and his pencils laid out and unused, and thought about how colossally unfair this all is. And he could hear El in the other room, tapping her fingernails against the wood of the table.

Of course he had seen her before. And they had talked, before. 

Obviously, that half-dream he’d had when she’d held his hand and told him his mom was going to get him was the first time. He tried not to think too hard about that moment, or the moments that preceded it, the terrible hours of running and hiding and trying not to die, or the moments afterwards, which were less running and less hiding and more dying. He’d assumed she was a hallucination, obviously. An angel. An angel with a shaved head and a pink dress with a white collar.

After that, he hadn’t seen her at all. Everyone thought she was dead. Will hadn’t pressed anyone about it, especially Mike, though Mike would tell him stuff about her in passing.  _ You felt like she could see right through you _ , he told him, hoarsely and quietly so Dustin and Lucas wouldn’t wake up.  _ I always felt like I needed to protect her, up until the last moment _ , he confessed, walking him home when his mom and his brother couldn’t swing something and had called the Wheelers in a panic.  _ El would understand. She always did. _

It wasn’t like he knew her. He sort of thought he did, though. He thought that if anyone knew, it was Mike. Mike, to him, always seemed to have a supernatural ability to know things. He always seemed to know when something was wrong with Will, in any case. And he was such a fantastic storyteller. He was their leader, their DM. And he obviously loved her, though at the time Will didn’t pick up on that and also didn’t care because Eleven was dead and she was also an angel, so why wouldn’t Mike be in love with her?

And then she was back.

Well, more things happened before that, and none of them were easy to think about. When Will had been in the Upside Down, it had been terrible and ugly. But at least then he’d been himself. When he was running from the monster (his friends all called it the demogorgon, even though it looked nothing like it- Mike said it was because that was the monster that had killed him in their campaign the night was taken, and Will said that he wasn’t capable of that kind of cogent thought while trying to outrun death in the freaking shadow realm) he’d been pure. Like maybe he knew if it caught him, he’d be corrupted.

Well, no. He knew that he hadn’t known. He’d been trying not to die.

Anyway, El came back. She came back to life.

He didn’t see her right away. He spent a few nights in a hospital, where his doctors declared him physically sound and his mom squabbled with them about exhaustion and trauma and anything else she could think of. Jonathan hovered concernedly no matter how many times Will snapped at him to leave, and his friends only came once he was back home. No, actually, Dustin and Lucas came. 

“Mike’s coming,” Lucas promised, sneaking glances at the door. He had been sneaking a lot of glances, all over the place. He very obviously did not want to look at Will. Will didn’t understand that- he was pretty sure he looked fine (though, later, he’d find a photo that Jonathan had taken during that first week where his eyes looked sunken and dead. When did they stop looking like that? Did they still look like that?)

“He’s probably just at his…” Dustin drew out the ‘s’ for too long. “His, uh, grandma’s. I heard she was sick, so. He’s probably just there.”

“Yeah, probably.” Will stared at his hands and wished he was alone.

Mike did come, eventually. Will was drawing at his desk, practicing backgrounds. He couldn’t make his mind come up with anything else. Today it was trees. Rows and rows. 

“That’s cool,” Mike said, when he got close enough to see. Will jumped- he’d thought it was his mom coming in or something. 

“Thanks.”

“How are you feeling?”

Will looked at him. He was searching for discomfort, and he found it, though Mike was trying to hide it. “Better,” he said. It wasn’t a lie. 

“You look tired,” Mike said. He scratched his nose. “I guess you aren’t in the mood to do anything.”

“Not really.”

“Do you want me to go?”

Will turned back like he was looking at his drawing, and closed his eyes. “No, you can stay,” he said, instead of,  _ I don’t want you here, but I don’t want to be alone with myself. _

He didn’t see Mike’s reaction, but, as he usually did, Mike guessed what he was really saying. “Okay. I’ll just read some of your comic books.”

He did. They didn’t talk, and Will was so grateful he could’ve cried. But he didn’t. They were boys, and they were thirteen, and crying wasn’t really something they could do anymore.

He didn’t really meet El, after that. It wasn’t like he could go hiking up to her cabin in the woods and ask for a visit. Chief Hopper didn’t let her out, either, not for Lucas’s birthday party or any of their D&D campaigns, though they got so few and short that he could barely count them as real campaigns anymore, probably because Mike spent all his time with El and had no time to come up with anything for them to do. Lucas was caught up with his own girlfriend, Max, who Will was scared to admit he thought was funny because it was a little too suspicious if he was openly opposed to Eleven and not all girls, as a rule. Not that he was opposed to Eleven. He didn’t even know her.

He caught her eye at the Snow Ball, over Mike’s shoulder. There was this vivid jolt of fear that went through him when their eyes met, like he’d been caught (but it wasn’t that weird to look at his friend- his eyes just went that direction). 

She held his gaze. He sought out the girl that Mike had described, the one who supposedly knew all, who had limitless knowledge of the hidden universe. But he couldn’t find it. She just looked like a girl dancing with his best friend.

Dinner was tense these days. His mom tried to remain cheerful. She asked everyone about their day, bobbling her head at whatever anyone said and smiling with this weird, out-of-control look in her eyes. Knowing her, she probably thought this was comforting, but it just reminding Will how everything was falling apart. Or, maybe it already had.

They had come here to escape Hawkins. And also to escape Bob’s death, and Hopper’s. But there was something stale and stagnant about this new house with its new smell and walls. From this distance everything that had happened since that very first night he’d been taken felt sort of hazy and distant. He wasn’t sure that was such a good thing. It was like lukewarm water. It was like a suspension tank (now that’s a fun conversation starter with Eleven!)

“How was your day, El?” his mom asked, right on schedule. She speared a piece of asparagus and stared expectantly at Eleven.

She coughed. She looked at her food. “Good,” she said.

There was something supremely un-shy about Eleven. Even as she stared away from them all, looking at her food so intensely that Will would assume she was about to trying to make it explode last summer, there was nothing ashamed or sheepish in her demeanor. Maybe she was angry. Maybe she just wanted to get back to sitting alone at the kitchen table.

“Well, I had a great day today,” Will’s mom said, when El didn’t elaborate. 

“Jenkins talked to you about the promotion?” Jonathan said, perking up for the first time all night. 

Will’s mom shook her head and sighed. “It was just so beautiful out today, you know? I ate my lunch outside. We’ve been having a, uh, cold spell-”

Jonathan lost interest. Will stared at a point behind his mom’s head. 

There was no point going into how school was. School was terrible. School had always sort of been terrible, but before he and his friends got made fun of as a group. Being alone was the worst thing Will had ever been.

Will was getting a glass of water in the kitchen when the phone rang. His back was turned to Eleven, but he heard her chair scrape back and her footsteps towards it. A second later, her voice, muffled by a wall between them.

He turned, water glass secured, and stared at the table. He was curious. And he couldn’t see there being many consequences- if El hated him, that might even be preferable to the collective numbness that had overtaken them all. He put the water glass in the sink and walked over.

The notebook seemed the most promising for revealing all of El’s secrets. He didn’t pick it up, but he flipped the cover open. 

Just the alphabet. Written twice, in marker, and then again. El’s letters were fat and wobbling, but not that bad. Plenty of people had messy handwriting, he decided. And if she got them all leaning the right way, it maybe could look sort of stylized.

He flipped through five more pages of alphabets, and then there was a page with names,  _ Jane _ ,  _ Mike, Lucas, Max, Dustin, Hopper, Will _ .

He was so weirdly touched by that. Maybe they weren’t friends, but she considered him important enough to put his name down in her practice notebook. Suddenly guilty for his crime, he closed the notebook and went to retrieve his water.

He could’ve gone to his room, but he didn’t want to do his homework or even look at it. He sat on the couch, which was pretty much like sitting on a slab of granite, and stared mindlessly at the TV for a while.

He wanted to go out- he was itching to go out. But there was nowhere to go. And, more importantly, there was no one to go with. Jesus. Hadn’t he predicted this perfectly? When he was saying goodbye to Dustin, he’d ruffled Will’s hair and told him that he’d make new friends in no time. Will had been crying pretty hard, which probably garbled his response, but what he wanted to say was,  _ no I won’t. We’re only really friends because we’ve been together since first grade. If I were moving to Hawkins from somewhere else, you probably wouldn’t even talk to me. _

El banged out of a room, startling Will so badly he spilled water on himself. He sprang up, holding the cup away from him like it was going to attack, and made direct eye contact with El as she came striding back into the room.

She froze. Total deer-in-the-headlights.

“Hey,” Will said, not knowing what else to say.

“Hello,” she said. She had a quiet voice, which was interesting given how loudly she always moved through the house. Slamming and stomping and stalking around.

“Were you talking to Mike?” Will asked. Stupidly, he added, “on the telephone.”

There was a long, weird pause. Will wondered vaguely if talking about Mike was somehow off-limits for them. 

“Mike doesn’t want to talk to me,” El said, suddenly and totally without venom. 

“Oh.” Will nodded, feeling like this was perhaps a break-through. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “he doesn’t want to talk to me either.”

They were just about the same distance they’d been at the Snow Ball, looking straight at each other. Only this time, there was no one else in the way. 

El walked over silently and sat down on the couch. After a minute, Will sat down too. They stared mutely at the TV screen.

“This couch is terrible,” El said. Will let out a laugh so small it was almost a cough.

“Who were you talking to? If it wasn’t Mike.”

She tilted her head back on the couch and closed her eyes, and it was such a familiar and normal thing that he was vaguely shocked. “Max,” she said. “She calls me when she’s sad.”

Will thought about how often he’d heard El take a call. He couldn’t monitor it when he was at school, but he recalled at least a dozen times it had rung before, sometimes during dinner or just as the sun was starting to come down. He had always assumed it was Mike, and had also always assumed that if he wanted to talk to him he would ask.

“She’s sad about her brother?” Will asked, and El nodded. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter. “I thought she hated him.”

“Yes.”

“But she’s sad that he’s dead.”

El turned her face towards him. “You would be. If your dad was dead.”

He went to respond, to tell her that that was different, but he stopped. “What do you know about my dad?” he asked.

She turned away again, and closed her eyes. “Mike told me.”

“He shouldn’t have,” Will said, immediately, anger rising in him like steam, clogging his throat and making him blink quickly. What had he told her? About the sleepover they’d had in third grade where they both woke up in the middle of the night because his parents were screaming at each other again? Or maybe the talk his dad had tried to give him when he was ten,  _ if you act like a fag you’re going to get called a fag, okay _ ?

“He said he was bad,” El said, like she could tell what he was thinking. “He said he left because he was bad. That’s all.”

Will looked at the floor. He didn’t believe her, not really. Her voice was level, the way it always was, and that made him angry, too. If she really cared what he thought she would try to sound a little  _ guilty _ . Or something. Maybe he was just looking for reasons to be angry at her. Maybe he was angry at the thought that she probably knew things about him that he had never told her, and she probably knew what Mike thought about them too. 

“You shouldn’t have let him talk about me when I wasn’t there,” Will said, and even he could hear the angry strain in his voice, like a streak of grease or a scratch on metal. 

“He never shut up about you,” El said, in response.

Okay. Okay. That was new information. 

Quickly, “I’m surprised you found time to talk about me. I thought you just made out all the time.”

It was a joke, sort of. Will was caught in the space between anger and neutrality, and this attempt at levity had come out a little more jagged than he meant it (which was annoying because it made it sound like he was jealous, which he wasn’t) (he hoped El was bad at picking up verbal cues.)

“We did,” El said, sounding a little confused. 

“I was joking,” Will said.

Out of absolutely nowhere, El asked him, “do you not like me?”

“No. I like you a lot,” Will said, immediately. Then, realizing how he sounded, he corrected himself. “I mean, not a lot. We’re friends, right?”

El’s eyes narrowed subtly. “This is the first time we’ve ever talked alone.”

Jesus Christ, why was she interrogating him? “Well, you were always with Mike. Or at your cabin. So there weren’t a lot of opportunities.”

“But you’re angry at me.”

Will looked at her. She blinked, and swallowed, but didn’t break eye contact. It was so weird to see her here, and when he held her up next to the sculpture he’d made in his mind of that imposing stranger, it made him sort of sad. 

Softly, and truthfully, Will said, “no, I’m not.”

She broke eye contact and looked back at the TV. Will kept watching her. There was something soft about her, like she had something everyone else was supposed to lose by this age. 

“I’m sorry your dad was bad,” she said, without looking at him.

He looked at the TV, too. “It’s not your fault.”

And that was their first conversation.

Interestingly, the first time Mike called him,  _ he _ picked up.

His mom had taken El somewhere (probably grocery shopping- they were always grocery shopping together. Will wasn’t sure this was a normal mother/daughter activity, but they both seemed pleased with it) and when the phone rang he assumed it was Max, which made him not want to pick up. Still, his urge to be considerate and at least let her know that Eleven wasn’t ignoring her, just out, won over his fear that if he picked up she’d be girl-crying, something he did not know what to do with. But when he answered, “Byers house,” it wasn’t Max who said, “Will, is that you?”

Will let out an involuntary breath through his nose, and had to recover for a whole second before he asked, “Mike?”

“Hey! I haven’t talked to you in forever.”

“Yeah,” Will said. It was all he could think of to say, because Mike had never once called him, the whole time he’d been here. Which was fine. It wasn’t like Mike had made grand promises to, and he assumed that everyone had a lot on their plates and just couldn’t make the time to call him. Or something. Or maybe high schoolers didn’t call each other- high school  _ boys _ didn’t call each other.

Still. He hadn’t heard from him at all. The last time he’d heard his voice was when he’d told him, “I’ll miss you,” right before he’d left. 

Finally, after way too long had passed, he said, “um, if you wanna talk to Eleven, she’s out right now.”

“No, I didn’t,” Mike said, immediately. Too quickly. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you.”

He sounded like he’d come up with that excuse on the spot. Maybe he had been hoping to catch Eleven on the phone and listen to her breathe or whatever and then hang up. Will thought Mike had stolen most of his and Eleven’s relationship from the movies. At least, that was the sense he got when he heard El talk about it.

“Did you have something to tell me?” Will asked.

“No, man, I just… wanted to know how you were doing.”

“Fine,” Will lied.

“Yeah? Made any friends.”

“A few. They’re cool.” Will started trying to come up with fake names, if Mike decided to ask for them.

“But not cooler than us, right?”

Will shrugged, and then realized that Mike couldn’t see him, and also that shrugging was a kind of lukewarm response. “Of course not,” he said.

“Cool,” Mike said. “Things are weird over here. High school’s different from eighth grade.”

“Way different.”

A staticky buzz came through, and then, Mike said, “I miss you, man. It’s so different without you.”

Will’s stomach flipped. Sometimes, the most subtle changes in Mike’s voice made him feel so wrong-footed he had to hold onto a table or a wall to keep standing.

“Max and Lucas broke up again,” Mike said. “Max has been acting pretty weird, though. She almost got into a fight with Jennifer Hayes a few weeks ago- like, we actually thought she was going to rip some of her hair out or something.”

“Wow.”

“Anyway, Lucas asked her to stop picking fights with him, you know, they always argue, and she broke up with him. It was so crazy. None of us know what to do.”

“Maybe it’s because of what happened to her brother,” Will suggested, neutrally. He was glad for Mike’s ability to talk between his silences, but this was a little idiotic, even for him.   
“Maybe,” Mike said, and then, a second later, “but didn’t they hate each other?”

“They grew up together,” Eleven said. “She knew him. She knew why he was angry.”

They were sitting on the couch together for the third time. The second time was just to watch TV one night when Will’s mom and Jonathan were out, but this time El had asked him if he could help her.

“My mom says that when people are hurt they hurt others,” Will said.

“She told me that too,” El said. “She’s trying to mother fourteen years of me in three months.”

Will laughed, and El smiled, closed-lipped. “Is it working?”

“I wouldn’t know,” El said. Then, “I like your mom.”

“Me too.”

“She’s nice.” Her eyebrows drew together. “She always says the right thing.”

“It’s not your job to mother Max,” Will said. 

“I want to help her not be sad,” El said, and sat up straight so she could comb her hands through her hair. “I don’t always know the right thing. To say.”

She started braiding her hair, and Will watched, a little fascinated. After a while, though, he spoke, “it’s not really the same- but, when I came back for the first time, I sort of felt like  _ I  _ had died.”

“You didn’t,” El said, less as a correction and more for him to confirm. Will nodded.

“It sort of felt like maybe there was a part of me that had disappeared, for good. At first I thought, you know, it was all the good parts, or the pure parts, but then I started to think it was just a fraction of  _ everything _ . So, it was a lot. And when I would get panicked, and I started to really want it all to go back, just reverse entirely, I just wanted someone to talk to. Not someone who understood, but someone who I could be with. Sometimes to distract me, but sometimes to just  _ sit  _ there.”

He swallowed. He had never said something like that aloud- it felt fake, laid out in words. 

“Was Mike your person?” El asked.

He wished she hadn’t.

He had a suspicion that she suspected, and he couldn’t let her. So he shook his head and said, “Jonathan.”

“Oh.”

“It’s probably different,” he said. “Grief is always different.”

“Yes,” El said.

Something about the way she said it made him remember, vividly, that Hopper was dead. The idea that he was lecturing an orphan about the death of his innocence or something was so monumentally embarrassing and disrespectful that he wanted to slap himself. 

Instead, he said, “if you need someone to be with you, I can.”

She nodded, and looked at him, dry-eyed. “I can be with you, too,” she said.

He thought if it were any other girl, the words would seem double-edged, but he was pretty sure they understood each other. And that idea, the idea that he wasn’t alone in this strange house, that there was one person here who could understand him, made him feel like he was seven years old again. Like he had a friend, again.

When he finally got the courage to ask about the book, another month had passed.

Things weren’t easy, per se. There was a new kind of smoothness between them, but it wasn’t like they were cracking jokes and making friendship bracelets yet. Still, the semi-animosity that Will had half-imagining between them seemed like it was lifting. So, in a moment of courage that surprised even himself, he finally asked, “so, what’s with the book?”

She wasn’t reading it. It was sitting in front of her, unopened, and she was watching TV. When he spoke, she jumped.

“This book,” she said, and touched it. She didn’t say it like a question, but he nodded anyway. “Mike gave it to me.”

“ _ Mike  _ gave it to you,” Will repeated. He looked again at the cover, the burly blonde-haired rogue dipping a girl in a purple-red dress. 

El nodded like, yes, of course, this was a normal gift from Mike. “He stole it from his mom.”

“Oh, I would’ve thought it used to be one of his,” Will said, and then, when El didn’t laugh, “joking.”

El smiled, and touched the fading cover fondly. “He told me it was an easy-read. I could get faster.”

“Yeah, but why-” he squinted at the cover, trying to discern letters through all the flourishes, “ _ Desire at Dusk _ ?”

El shrugged, “He thought it was something a girl would like.”

They stared at each other. Will broke first, and then El, and then they were laughing uncontrollably. “Something a  _ girl  _ might like,” Will repeated, gasping for air. “Oh my god.”

“Totally clueless,” El said.

“I can’t believe you  _ dated _ Mike,” Will said, and, without thinking about it, “what was it like?”

He wanted to take the words back and swallow them as soon as they were out of his mouth. He could feel his eyes widening, his face going red. He tried to smile, but alarm bells were blaring in his mind: SHE CAN TELL! SHE CAN TELL! SHE CAN TELL!

El, however, did not seem to tell. She looked upwards, the way she always did when she was searching for words, and then said, “it was good.”

“Oh,” Will said, casually bobbing his head like a possessed muppet.

El looked at him, again. “Good. But hard. He wanted… something specific from me. He was surprised. Sometimes.”

This was a lot more detail than Will had been expecting. El actually looked a little pained- she had this twitch at the corner of her mouth, and she looked like she wanted him to say something, but he didn’t know what. They waited, both silent.

“What was it like being his best friend?” El asked.

Will’s first instinct was to say ‘good’, but something stopped him. There was an urge he often felt around her to be honest. Why was that? It wasn’t like telling the truth had ever really gotten anything off his chest. It just tore things apart.

And yet he remembered that familiar  _ friend _ feeling, one he hadn’t felt in so long.

“He was always the captain,” Will said. “The leader. Among all of us, but even when you were alone with him, he was always the one who kept things on course. So, obviously, it was like a gift when you got his attention.”

Getting Mike to look at him was like scoring in a video game. Getting him to laugh at one of his jokes made Will feel like he was riding a sugar high for an hour afterwards. His attention was like the sun, and they all leaned into him for it. His approval. His affection, which used to be open and easy.

“And he looked out for me. After I disappeared, he was always watching me, like I might slip away again. Honestly, I don’t know if it was me or  _ you _ who made him start doing that.”

Eleven was absolutely still. She had half-turned in her chair, and one of her hands was still flat on the table. He saw a finger twitch, the tiniest bit. 

“And then you came back, and it was like… his whole universe revolved around you. And suddenly we weren’t splitting his attention three ways, we were fighting for it like dogs under a table, like, um, like table scraps. And so Dustin left, and Lucas had Max, and it was like- I was still there. And I was stuck there. So yeah, I guess it was kind of difficult being his best friend.”

And it was almost it. It was just on the edge of  _ it _ . But he wasn’t going to go there for the first time (aloud, or in his head, or anywhere) in front of Mike’s fucking  _ girlfriend. _

He probably shouldn’t have even opened his stupid fucking mouth in the first place. This whole situation was actually far from ideal.

All of a sudden, El got up. She approached him cautiously, like he might run, and stood before him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Which was actually kind of terrible, because it wasn’t her fault. This fact cut through all the bullshit that he had, and maybe still sort of was, keeping festering in his heart for El, because  _ Jesus fucking Christ _ , he was such an asshole for that.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “Seriously, El.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not my fault. But I’m sorry that it was me.”

“Seriously-”

“I broke up with him,” she said. “The first week here. Over the phone. I did.”

He could smell her breath, her totally alien girl-smell. He could see the hairs that escaped her braids, waving like anemones in the warm wind seeping through the windows.

“I did it because-” she looked down, her voice catching like she was frustrated, “I knew that I was his sheet of paper.”

Will wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “His paper?”

“Mike taught me everything I know about being a person,” El said. “And a teenager. And a girl. And a girlfriend. And when I met him- I was none of those things. Just an experiment. A blank sheet of paper.”

Her face had grown red. She didn’t look at him, even though they were so close, and that’s why it took him so long to realize she was crying.

“ _ He  _ drew Eleven,” she said. “He drew her because he loved her. But I wasn’t meant to be Eleven, I was supposed to be  _ Jane _ .”

Jane. The name he’d found at the top of that list in the notebook. He wondered, distantly, if it was her own creation, or something she’d found. 

“Jane,” El said. “If I was Jane, I’d have a favorite song because it reminded me of being a kid. I’d have a favorite jacket because it was my mom’s. And I wouldn’t even give Mike the time of day.”

She shook, wavering on her feet. Will, not knowing what else to do, hugged her. He did it tentatively, scooping his arms under hers and holding his hands out behind her back, but she clung to him like she was drowning. They stood in the kitchen, Will’s shoulder getting wet with her tears.

“It’s okay,” he said, over and over. “I’ve got you. It’s going to be okay.”

They looked at the contents of the box together. A book from Mike. A journal from Hopper, which she’d been using to practice writing. Ticket stubs, from a movie she’d seen with Max. A typewriter cartridge she’d found in the woods and kept in her coat pocket during those months living alone out there. A pair of scissors she’d broken during a fight with Hopper. Three plastic forks of unknown origin that she’d kept in a jar in her room like flowers.

“Why bring them out every day?” he asked.

Jane shrugged. She tapped them, each and each. “I don’t have anything else older than two months.”

They stared at it. A short history in a new world.

“Hi,” Mike said.

He definitely wasn’t the last person Will was expecting, but it was still kind of spooky to hear his voice. “Long time no talk.”

“Yeah!” Mike said, way too enthusiastically. It was seven at night; Joyce was home, and Jonathan was still out. Will looked over his shoulder to make sure Mike’s affirmation hadn’t echoed like a shot through the house. “How are you?”

“Still good,” Will said. “You?”

“So great,” Mike said. “Really great. Hey, by any chance do you know when you’re coming home?”

Will frowned. Was Mike having some kind of break down? He only sounded like this when he was lying, which was weird because he wasn’t really saying anything that could be classified as a lie. Yet. Maybe he was building up to it.

“I think Jonathan wants to come down for Christmas,” Will said. “Not my mom, though. Why?”

“Just wanted to know when to get excited,” Mike said. Will frowned. He actually wasn’t sure he was coming back to Hawkins. It would probably mean leaving Jane behind, and that seemed wrong. Especially to hang out with good old cheery Mike, who was definitely not sounding crazy on the phone right now.

“You called to confirm I was coming for Christmas,” Will said. “That’s it?”   
And there was this incredibly telling pause, so dramatic Will almost rolled his eyes. Spit it out, he wanted to say.

“No, that’s it.” Mike sounded weary, like it was really taking it out of him to lie on this phone call. “And so you don’t forget about me. Because your new friends. Ha ha.”

The fake laugh at the end was too much. He was playacting pathetic right now, but it wasn’t playacting because that was just how Mike was.

“Don’t worry about that,” Will said. “I couldn’t forget you guys.”

Another loaded pause. SPIT IT OUT.

“Will,” Mike said, sudden and sharp. Gunshot sound.

“Yeah?”

“I miss you,” he said.

Will closed his eyes. “I miss you too.”

Will told her that she should try to acknowledge the things she liked and didn’t like. “Say it out loud,” he suggested. “Or write it down.”

She made lists. Songs, first, and TV shows. Then, cutouts from magazines. Words. Smells. Foods. “I like that man’s hair,” she said, once, as they watched Family Feud. “I like that lipstick.”

Joyce took her to the store and they brought back cheap makeup. She refused to let him help her put it on, disappearing into the bathroom for thirty minutes and emerging with her mouth a vivid pink stain and her eyes purple as bruises. She shook her head at him and suppressed a smile when she saw him, like he would know enough about makeup to make any kind of judgement. She walked past him and to the phone.

Max picked up right away. Will heard Jane say, “I like makeup,” before he disappeared into his room.

They were watching TV together, basically a ritual now, when Jane turned to him and said, “Will. I like you.”

He froze. For a second, he didn’t know what to do. Did she mean what he thought she meant?

“I don’t love you, though,” she said.

His sigh of relief was almost audible. 

“I don’t love you, either,” he said, wanting to confirm this for good.

“Of course not. You love Mike.”

He probably would have actually vomited onto the carpet had his stomach not left his body and dropped through the floor. Every single part of him screamed at him to run straight out the front door and go live in the woods for the foreseeable future. He could probably subside on raw fish and berries.

“I know it’s a secret,” Jane said. “I didn’t tell Max. I’ll never tell Mike.”

He was still staring at her, unable to express any kind of words. She seemed not to notice, moving right into her next statement.

“I can tell you a secret back,” she said. “Here.” She leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “Max loves me. She told me so.”

Somehow, it was this revelation that loosened Will’s tongue. “She said she  _ loved  _ you?”

“Yeah.” Jane leaned back and grinned, a little sheepishly. 

“ _ In love with you _ ?” 

She nodded. She was  _ blushing _ . This conversation was so incredibly, impossibly strange. “Holy shit,” Will said. “Wow. Oh my god. Do you love her?”

“I think so,” Jane said. “I won’t tell her yet. But I do.”

They looked at each other, and Will started to giggle. He couldn’t stop. Jane looked a little hurt at first, but then she cracked, too. There were tears in his eyes that wouldn’t fall, small and hot.

“Well, I guess friends don’t lie,” Will said, still tee-heeing like a twelve-year-old girl.

“No,” Jane said, and then smacked him in the shoulder. “I hate it when they say that. It’s a toddler sentence.”

That made it worse. Will slid halfway down the couch, barely able to breathe. Jane was doing a squeaky imitation of her own twelve-year-old voice, a dispassionate and slow monotone.

“But seriously,” he said, laying there with his hands over his stomach. “You’re my friend. My best friend.”

“Your best friend,” Jane echoed. “I’ll do my best at it.”

He closed his eyes. “Me too.”

“Hey, it’s Mike.”

Will swallowed. “Oh. Hi.”

At his voice, enthusiasm sprang up in his voice. “Hey! You never called me again.”

“You never called me.”

“Busy with your new friends, huh?”

Will glanced out the window. There was dingy grey ice, but no snow. Not very Christmassy- but the scene was imperfect enough without his brother there.

“No, not really.”

“Oh, okay.” Mike paused. “Is something going on?”

And maybe it was because Jane was making him want to be honest. Maybe because he felt like he had crossed over the biggest mountain in the world, and stumbled out the other side totally changed. Chewed up  _ and  _ spat out.

He decided to tell the truth.

“No. I just don’t have any friends.”

A sort of stunned silence from Mike.“Wow. That totally sucks, dude.

Will laughed, once, sharply. “Yeah, it totally does.”

“Are you mad at me?”

He was. All of a sudden. He was so mad about Mike, about everything. He was mad that he had no friends at school, and mad that Mike was lying to him now, and mad that everything was such bullshit. And that made him fearless.

“No. Why did you call?”

“I don’t know. I missed you. I thought you would come home for the holidays.”

“I’m sort of home right now,” Will said, point-blank. “It’s not like we have any family in Hawkins.”

“Well, Jonathan came down to see Nancy, so I guess I thought you’d come too.”

He laughed again. “To see you?”

“No, just-”

“I wanted to spend Christmas with my mom.”

“She could’ve come,” Mike said.    
“Well, we would’ve had to have left Jane, right?”

“Who?”

Will rolled his eyes. He knew Jane had told him about her mom. “Eleven.”

Mike hesitated, clearly weighing the pros and cons. “She could’ve come,” he said, carefully.

“What do you want from me Mike? I’m sort of mad at you right now.”

“I thought you said-”

“Sometimes I say things I don’t mean, as you know,” Will said, quickly. 

“Jeez, okay.”

“You say things you don’t mean, too. Or, actually, you just don’t say things. And you should. There are some things you should say. And you don’t.”

There was this long, awful pause, but for the first time in Will’s life, he didn’t care that it was awkward. He could hear his heartbeat in his ears, steady and loud. 

“I-” Mike started, and stopped. His voice squeaked like a rusty hinge, panic just starting to creep in. “I can’t. I can’t.”

Will could hear him breathing. That romance cliche he’d thought of so long ago came to him again, and he thought that there was a weird intimacy to it. A closeness. These are the lungs, he thought, that make the person I love breathe. Huh. Wow. Really cool. Not so cool when those lungs will be the ones that push air to tell me no. 

“Just say yes or no, and we’ll drop it,” Will said. “That much. Yes or no.”

More breathing. More heartbeat. 

“I want things to go back to the way they were,” Mike said, finally. His voice sounded like a closed gate.

“When?” Will asked.

“When we were kids,” Mike whispered.

“We are kids.”

“You know what I mean.”

Will leaned his forehead against the wall. Months ago, he would have agreed. Months ago, he would have given anything to turn time back and been eleven again. Ten. Anything but present. It was happening all wrong, like a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from.

“We can’t,” Will said. “I’m sorry things aren’t simple. Don’t you think it was time we started doing non-simple things, though? Things that will matter?”

And even though he was mad, even though there were months between them, if Mike had said yes then, Will would’ve been in. All in. 

Mike didn’t say yes. He said, “I wish you were here right now.”

“Don’t say things if you don’t mean them,” Will said.

Silence.

“Merry Christmas,” Will said, and hung up.

On New Years, his mom went to some party with her coworkers. “Are you sure you’ll be alright?” she fussed, checking that there were enough leftovers for them in the fridge. “I don’t need to go.”

“Mom,” he said, waving her off. “It’s fine. Go.”

Max had driven up from Hawkins on the 28th, and gotten permission from Joyce to stay until New Year’s Day. Will didn’t know why Joyce was allowing it, because Max and Jane were absolutely sickening. They wouldn’t stop holding hands, even while they danced to the mix Max had made her for Christmas. Still, he was willing to forgive it for how happy Jane looked- how happy they both looked, actually. He had seen Max smile a few times before, but she hadn’t stopped since arriving. 

“Come dance with us,” Jane ordered, pointing with her free hand at Will.

“I’m watching the ball drop,” he said, staring resolutely at the muted television set.

“I thought you liked music,” Max said. “I thought that was your whole  _ thing _ .”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m invested in a timeless New Year’s celebration.”

“He’s moping,” Jane whispered loudly (she was tipsy- both of them were).

Max raised her eyebrows. “Moping?”

“There’s no time for moping,” Jane said. “Mike is the one who should mope.”

“Aha!” Max said, clapping her hands together suddenly. “I knew there was something going on with you two!”

Will could not stop himself from paying sudden attention. “What did he tell you?”

She directed her gaze to the ceiling. “Nothing. He’s just completely obsessed with you.  _ Mooning _ , all over our bio assignments. It was pathetic. I didn’t realize it was  _ mutual _ .”

“It’s not mutual!” Will said. “Why don’t you make out with your girlfriend and leave me alone?”

“I don’t want you to cry,” Jane said, seriously. 

Then, the phone rang.

Jane and Max’s heads both whipped towards Will.

“No,” he said.

“ _ Will _ ,” Jane said.

“Hold on, is that him?” Max cackled, madly. “He is  _ desperate _ ! Are you picking up?”

Will shook his head, violently. Jane blinked at him, and then let go of Max and walked over to the phone. Max quickly paused the music. It was totally silent.

“Byers,” Jane said, mildly. Her eyes narrowed. She glanced at Will. “He’s here. Will, it’s for you. It’s Mrs. Robinson.”

Will’s shoulders retreated from his ears, where they’d been hovering. Mrs. Robinson was a woman a few streets down who had asked him to cat sit twice. It was a weird time of night to be calling, but she was old and for all he knew she thought they were best friends. 

He gamely accepted the phone from Jane and pressed it against his ear. “Hi there.”

“Hello, William,” Mrs. Robinson said. “I’m so sorry to bother you at this time of night, but there’s a young man who says he’s here to see you and he’s been looking for your house.”

Will’s whole body shut down. He was pretty sure he went momentarily blind.

“I wanted to make sure you knew each other before sending him over,” she continued. “He says his name is-” and here she stopped, and there was a muted noise from beyond the speaker- “Michael Wheeler?”

Will wheezed. He was developing asthma right there and then. 

“William?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Yes, yeah. I know him.”

“Okay. I’ll juts-”

He slammed the phone into the cradle like it was on fire. There was so much inside of him in that moment- anger, and fear, and breathless, fathomless joy. His eyes burned, and he covered them with his hands, knowing that if he started crying he’d start sobbing.

Someone rushed behind him- Jane- and grabbed his shoulder. “What’s wrong?” she said, from a far distance. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s-” he began, and took a deep breath so he wouldn’t pass out. “He’s here. He must have- have forgotten the house number. She’ll send him over, she said.”

“Jonathan?” she asked, still concerned.

“No,  _ Mike _ ,” he said, and then he actually started to cry, or laugh. He was definitely going to vomit if this persisted.

“Mike!” Max shrieked.

Jane, who had been gently touching his back, immediately started shoving him past the phone and towards the kitchen, squawking, “go! Go get him!”

He broke free of her hold and crouched on the floor so she couldn’t push him anymore. From this incredibly sane position, he hissed, “no, are you crazy? No! I’m not going out there!”

“Why not?” Max asked.

“I  _ can’t _ ,” Will said, irrationally. He couldn’t put into words how going outside would confirm it all- and he still wasn’t actually certain if he would say yes. If he was ready. If  _ Will _ was ready.

“Will, you idiot!” Max said, laughing. “You have to!”

Again, that miniature explosion- grief, fear, anger, excitement- and he gritted his teeth. “No, just- you guys go out there and tell him I’m not home.”

“Will!” Jane shouted, so loud that he was too startled to answer. 

She crouched down in front of him. Her hair fell over her eyes, and she looked so serious that he almost laughed. He didn’t though- he let himself get caught up in her solemness. 

“Don’t be scared,” she said. “He came here for you. It’s yours, now.”

He knew she meant the choice- and he also knew that, in a way, she was handing Mike to him. They’d both loved him, he knew. It used to be the thing that barred them, but he knew now that it connected them, and it surpassed  _ Mike _ . They were Jane and Will, now.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” he whispered. He breathed out, ragged. He never, ever thought he would feel this way. He never thought this would happen, not to him.

“You can,” Jane said. Then, she smiled. “Your best friend should know.”

He put on his brother’s coat, hanging by the door, and his boots without tying the laces, then ran down his own steps. It was late, almost nine, and the sky was utterly black. Blocks of yellow spilled out from houses onto the snow- because, of course it was snowing. Not the wet, ugly kind they’d been getting for months, either. Delicate, tiny, white snow. 

He stood in the middle of the street and looked both ways down, but didn’t see him. Was he supposed to wait? Jane and Max probably wanted him to, so they could watch everything happen, but he was too full of energy to stand still, so he started down the road, not quite running. It would be supremely unromantic if he fell and broke his neck.

He was suddenly aware of everything. His ears burned in the cold, his nose already running. In the absolute silence, his breath and the shifting of his jacket were impossibly loud. And his heart was so loud, echoing in his ears and his throat.

Then, he saw him.

He was also making his way down the center of the street; there was no way it could be anybody else. Will’s breath caught, his heart fluttered, he was made of cliches. 

Without even thinking, he started jogging towards him, and he could see him notice, and starting to jog towards him to, and in the moment of exhilaration, he slipped on a patch on ice and landed hard on his back.

“Shit!” he heard him yell, and he was still struggling to his feet by the time he reached him, looking extremely worried. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Will said. He was going to have a huge bruise, but he couldn’t make himself care. “Totally fine. How did you get here?”

“I drove,” Mike said. “Stole my dad’s car, he’ll probably be really angry, I don’t even have my license yet.” He laughed, wildly. “I just walked out the front door with the keys, I didn’t say anything. And I drove all the way here. I can’t believe I didn’t swerve into a ditch or something.”

“Why?” Will asked.

“I just-” Mike stopped, a deer-in-the-headlights blankness taking over his expression, and Will felt like that could end it. Mike would say that he came to see him, he’d laugh in that weird insane way, he’d look guilty and upset, and he’d go home tomorrow morning like nothing even happened.

But then, his expression changed, and he smiled like he was absolutely terrified. “I have to tell you something.”

“You could’ve called,” Will said, unable to stop himself, unable to risk the possibility that this wasn’t what he thought it was.

Mike shook his head. “No, I couldn’t. I had to- I haven’t seen you in so long.”

“Likewise,” Will said. “You look taller.”

“You look different,” Mike said.

“Better?”

“Happier,” Mike said.

“It’s just because I’m looking at you,” Will said, without thinking. His thoughts caught up, and he immediately wished he was dead. But Mike laughed. His hair was longer, Will noticed.

“How’s El?”

“Jane,” Will corrected.

“Jane,” Mike repeated. “She’s probably told you all kinds of bad things about me, huh?”

Will shook his head. “Not really.”

“I treated her badly,” Mike said, and any anger Will felt about it lessened- he knew when Mike was genuinely sorry. 

“You should talk to her about it,” Will said. “You can still be friends, if you talk to her.”

“Will,” Mike said, in his gunshot way. “I don’t want to be that bad person, anymore. I mean, I don’t want to treat people badly.”

He knew what he was saying. 

“That’s a good thing to want,” Will said.

“I mean- I fucked up. I fucked up everything, with Jane, and with you, and everyone. And I want to stop fucking up. I mean-” he stopped, his breathing shaky. He looked at his hands, then back at Will. “I’m really sorry.”

He had never expected him to apologize.

He never thought Mike was paying attention to him, enough to recognize that he’d hurt him. 

“Thank you,” he said, and, because he was bold, now, he reached out to him and took his hand. Inexperienced in handholding as he was, it ended up being kind of a handshake position. But it was something- definitely something he would never do even three months ago.

“I want to tell you,” Mike said, and then, again, “I want to tell you, uh, I want to tell you yes. That’s what I came to say.”

Will watched him. He felt like he could see past him, to the very first time they ever met.  _ I remember this _ , he thought.  _ I remember that you. I want to remember  _ this _ you, and everything that comes after it. _

“I love you,” Mike said, suddenly. Even he looked a little shocked at his boldness, and he smiled. “I drove a long time, and had to talk to your elderly neighbor, so- I mean, can’t go unsaid.”

Will laughed in a single, shaky breath, and then swallowed. “Me too,” he said. “I’ve been trying to tell you forever.”

He couldn’t go back to Hawkins, and Jane couldn’t either, which is unfortunate because they now both want access to the phone after school. Jane started writing letters, and Will made fun of her for being cheesy, and he joined the drama club and she made fun of him for being a cliche. But it felt like a new world.

It felt like the right world, like he’d been waiting his whole life for this. Months gone, he realized that he’d stopped expecting the world end, like maybe they wouldn’t all last another year. He started looking forward to college, and even beyond that. 

“What do you want to do?” Jane asked him. “Do you have a plan?”

“I don't know," he said. "We can just sit around on the couch for the rest of our lives. Or become synchronized swimmers. A travelling act. Whatever you want."

She took the drawing he had just finished, the two of them sitting under a tree somewhere, and held it in front of her. He already knew she’d put it in the box, along with the empty makeup capsules, the snapped hairties, the letters she and Max had started sending. He no longer wondered at being a part of her history, because she was a part of his. 

She nodded, serious as ever. “Okay. Let's do that."  
  


**Author's Note:**

> yeah i wrote this at like two am one night... i was not going to publish it but i got suddenly super fired up over the idea of will and jane becoming friends because they absolutely need to be friends and there can't be an alternative. max appears minimally in this fic which is UNPRECEDENTED by my standards, but i originally planned a sequel/companion to this that would take place over the same months from max's perspective and dealing a bit with her relationship with mike (bc symmetry) but idk if that'll happen.  
> This was way different from my normal stuff! like, way way different! I'm already regretting posting it a little! but I hope you enjoyed nonetheless!  
> Thanks for reading and stay safe!!!!


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